The Attack Of The Hyphen

I always thought that E-bay was founded by some guy’s wife trying to unload her Beanie Baby collection.

So, when I saw this I was intrigued:

SAN FRANCISCO – EBay founder Pierre Omidyar has become the latest self-made tech baron to plunge into the struggling news industry – hot on the heels of Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, who just paid $250 million for the Washington Post.

But unlike Bezos, the French-born Iranian American says he aims to build a new “mass media organization” from the ground up, and his first recruits are the journalists who exposed the U.S. government’s surveillance programs, using documents leaked by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Seriously.

French-born Iranian American.

Am I an American-born German American? Why would Omidyar not simply be a French American? Or an Iranian American?

“French-born Iranian American.”
Silly, isn’t it? The only purpose I can see for making such a distinction is to suggest that even American-born citizens can be somehow un-American or non-American and somehow influenced by other cultures/countries than their own.